Epitaph
by wtfel
Summary: The grand magister's memory is vivid, far-reaching, and most often, more trouble than it's worth. (One-shot, for the weekly prompt "Empty.")


He should be fast asleep by this hour, but he rarely sleeps through nights like these.

" _Rommath_."

The boy is hesitant to leave the safety of his blankets; gaps in the roofing let in quite a chill wind during the winter months—snow, if they're really unlucky—and he's willing to wager the floor's prickling with a fresh layer of frost, this late at night.

But an audience with the prince of Quel'Thalas is not so easily refused, no matter how many times he has to be told that the title has no real value this far from Silvermoon.

It's got value to Rommath. Kael may not let him kneel, but he reveres the prince all the same.

Even when he can hear the mattress groaning, footsteps light on the floorboards as Kael crosses the room to his bedside. The prince doesn't always live up to his title, when the nights are late and sleep is seldom, sparse at best.

Doesn't matter. Wide-eyed, teary, and trembling or no, he's royalty.

"I'm sorry," he sniffs, pressing the heels of his hands to his eyes. "I'm so sorry, I shouldn't wake you—"

Rommath sits up with a shrug, eyes darting back to his book where it lay spine-up amid his sheets, runes pulsing softly across the cover in the lowlight. "Wasn't sleeping."

"It's late." His tone is almost reproachful, but that's the closest Kael comes to concern. "If you fall asleep during lessons, Telestra will have you flayed and tanned. And when she finds out it's my fault, she'll make me wear you around when the weather calls for a cloak. Oughtta get some rest."

As should he, truly. But Rommath's fretting is best kept to himself. Kael loves to be the subject of many things, but worrying and wringing hands have never been among them.

Rommath rolls to his side, making space for the prince on his pillow; he knows how this goes.

"I'm sorry, I really am sorry," Kael tells him again. "I'm so sorry."

Rommath stays silent, as per the usual.

Silent when Kael sniffles and chokes back a sob; silent when Kael slips an arm around him—like a stranglehold, just sweeter—and smothers the rest of his miserable sounds in Rommath's shirt; silent when he's soaked through the fabric, hot tears cooling against his skin; silent through the ' _I just want to sleep, Rom'_ s and the ' _I'm so tired_ 's.

He stays silent until Kael manages to do the same—fingers still twisted up in Rommath's shirt and flanks heaving with every breath, but silent.

When he speaks, the words are gentle, so as not to disrupt the tenuous peace. "I have nightmares too."

Kael flicks a glance his way, wiping his nose on his sleeve. "The same ones, over and over?"

"You remember when I first came to live here? I still used to dream about my brother." He pauses to pull the blankets up around them, layered thick over their shivering shoulders. "I would wake in tears, crying for my mother and father— _Minn'da, Ann'da, they got him, they got him, they got him!_ —and somehow you always managed to be there when I woke, kneeling beside my bed. Remember what you would tell me?"

Kael coughs into his arm, nodding his reply.

"There aren't any trolls in Dalaran." Rommath works his hands free from beneath the prince's weight to take him by the wrist. "You're safe here. And if you're not convinced and you're still scared, you can sleep on this side, so they get me first."

The prince smiles weakly, lips no less pale and ashen.

"And when I wouldn't quit my sniffling, you'd hold me close and hum," Rommath continues. "Seemed an odd approach to me, but you've got a voice like a songbird and your tunes always reminded me of my mother's hymns."

"Just odes and ballads Father made me learn," Kael says, an idle explanation. "Are you going to sing to me?"

Rommath gives his head a curt shake. He possesses neither the voice nor the confidence. But the prince prods at him all the same, eyes wide and expectant in the dark.

"I don't know any odes or ballads." Not a lie, but not much of a real reason either; he's no songbird, more of a sparrow—a small, twittering thing, flitting about with no true direction. "Not by heart, anyway."

"Then sing me one of those hymns."

The boy frowns, pushing a few strands of dark hair out of his eyes. "I can't sing them without her."

Kael doesn't argue this; he misses his mother too, says so often. "Then tell me a story."

"Story?"

"Tell me a story about you," the prince says. "You never talk about you. I want to hear about you."

"Not a very interesting topic, I'm afraid." He wets his lips, nervous, but they stick shut anyhow. "Wh…What do you want to know?"

A thoughtful frown furrows the prince's brow. "Why'd you come here?"

"Here?" says Rommath, squirming in Kael's grip. "You kind of…pulled me. And I didn't want you to be scared."

"I'm not scared," the prince says hastily.

"I know, I know."

"Not what I meant anyway," Kael tells him.

Rommath tilts his head to one side, a silent plea for explanation.

"Why'd you come _here_?" Kael asks. "To Dalaran?"

"To bunk with a prince, of course," he says dryly.

"That's no answer."

He hesitates. "I…wasn't benefiting as much from my tutelage in Silvermoon."

The words are his father's. He wonders if they taste just as sour in the High Minister of Arcane Magic's mouth.

"Why's that?"

"Too slow for Father. And Instructor Antheol called me a troublemaker." He shrugs as best he can with the prince's head hidden in the crook of his neck. "I ruined his set of learner's tomes, so he lashed me. I cried in front of the whole class. Didn't want to go back after that. Father was furious. Now I'm here."

Kael keeps quiet, no sniffles and no sobs, just long enough for Rommath to mistake him for sleeping.

"I'm glad you came," he says finally.

"To Dalaran?" Rommath asks.

"Right here."

He smiles a sweet smile for Silvermoon's smallest prince, the sort he uses so sparingly, and almost exclusively on Kael. It's the best reply he's got to offer.

"Tell me another story." The weary words seem to stick together, swallowed up by a yawn, but his hold on Rommath is tight as ever, and he gives no indication that he intends to let go. "So you don't fall asleep. I don't wanna be alone."

"All right." Rommath has never much cared for sleep anyway. And even if he ever has, he cares for Kael more. "So there once was a little boy, and his mother was a priestess…"

* * *

He should be fast asleep by this hour, but he rarely sleeps through nights like these.

Outland's sky is a void, in the most literal sense of the word. An endless void, streaked with bands of endless light. The Twisting Nether is in plain view tonight, gold and green and red all tangled together in a chaotic mess that one can only appreciate after staring into that damnable void for months— _years_. Light, it's been a year.

The days pass slowly here, like someone poured tar in the Sands of Time; maybe his thoughts just feel faster, because they've been racing often as of late, or maybe it's just that every time he searches the sky for a sun, he sees a void.

Because the sun is sitting right over his shoulder—or lying, as a matter of fact, with his eyes squeezed shut as he slumbers. Must be night, then.

Even the sun must set, at the end of each day; even Sunstriders suffer. Kael is mortal, after all, even if the rest tend to forget.

Rommath remembers.

Most often, it's the nights that remind him. The prince still shakes and shudders in his sleep, but he doesn't ask that Rommath wake him, not anymore. "Why bother?" he asks now, wearing some twisted parody of a smile. "The waking world's not much better."

So Rommath obeys, as he always does, opting to stand guard instead. "Stands" is a loose term.

More often than not, he ends up seated at the prince's bedside or kneeling like a devout, his head in his hands and his eyes drifting shut.

If asked, he'll say it's willpower that he keeps them open, fixed on the sheets below—he memorized the pattern long ago, but that's fading too.

If he's being honest, it's just fear, nothing more.

Fear for his prince. Fear for his people. Fear that they all might die in this Light-forsaken "promised land," ripped apart by demons, their bones left to dry in the dust and the stagnant air.

He is powerless, armed with nothing but his loyalty, and he fears that his loyalty might not be enough to save them when—

"Rom?"

Trust Kael to interrupt his thoughts the moment they begin to wander astray. The prince is kind like that.

Rommath's fatigue weighs heavy on him; it's a struggle just to lift his head and set his shoulders straight. Or maybe he misses sleep more than he thought. "Be still."

For a moment, Kael complies, silent save for his labored breaths. He feels along the edge of the bed, searching in the darkness for Rommath's hand, and pulls it to his chest so he can feel his royal blood racing recklessly through his veins.

"I didn't wake you, did I?" he asks finally, once he can breathe.

Rommath shakes his head, propping his chin on his hand to keep himself upright. "I wasn't sleeping."

"No?" Brows drawn in a frown, he reaches to brush his fingers over Rommath's cheek, to trace them along his jaw. "Were you praying?"

"I'm not religious."

"You'd pray when we were boys." He tilts Rommath's head back, gentle as he forces him to meet his gaze, the way only Kael can be. "But you stopped."

The prince's eyes burn too bright in the darkness—green that gleams, green that glows. His expression is calm, surprisingly tranquil in all consideration, but there's an intensity to his stare that chills Rommath to the marrow, any that's thawed since Northrend.

"I missed my mother, that's all," he says, shrugging.

Kael's gaze is even, but the curiosity that sparks in his eye is blinding in this dark. "Have you no faith now?"

 _The Light cannot reach this far into the void._

Rommath is silent, even his breaths. He can't even be sure he's breathing at all until Kael twists his fingers in his robes, pulling him close, and his lungs give out on him.

"You need your faith here," the prince tells him, his voice softer than a whisper. "You need your prayers." Angling his head closer, he brushes a rather persuasive pair of fingers over Rommath's lips—surprisingly tender. "I need your prayers," he adds, almost as an afterthought. His laugh is hoarse, so dry that it hurts to hear. "If you won't pray for us, then pray for me. I do believe I'm breaking, Rommath."

True, perhaps—the prince's chest rises and falls much too slow, even when he sleeps, like the weight of the world and all its worries is stacked on his sternum, and he's struggling to survive. But Rommath still wishes he wouldn't say so.

"Maybe I just spend a little too much time here, too close to the Nether—all that chaos is going to tear me apart," he says softly. "I want to go home." The prince looks at Rommath the way he used to look at Silvermoon from the sixth floor of Sunstrider Spire. "You'll pray for me, won't you?"

He doesn't speak a word. He hasn't the heart to tell his prince that prayer doesn't work, nor faith, nor the Light. They've strayed too far; they're beyond help now.

The merest ghost of a frown crosses Kael's features, just the bare bones of unease, near invisible in the darkness. "I find your silence…a tad unnerving."

Well, he finds Kael's pallor a tad unnerving, but he thinks better of himself before he points this out. Instead, he takes the prince by the shoulder, using him as an anchor as he hoists himself up onto the bed, joints aching and head spinning. He doesn't say a thing, and he doesn't plan to.

Kael's next breath sounds closer to a hiss, too much air forced through clenched teeth and tight lips, but he's smiling—or something like it. "You were the quietest boy I'd ever met, you know. I swear sometimes you'd go days without speaking. You'd just stare at things, contemplating, like you were trying to understand them in a way no one else could."

A heavy sigh slips out from the corner of his mouth, but he doesn't feel any lighter.

"Did it ever work, I wonder?" The prince leans back to share his thoughtful smile, eyes narrowed in contemplation of his own. "Did you ever manage to find your own perspective, your own…ah, unique frame? Did you ever appreciate life—things—people—in some vastly different way?"

Rommath's shoulders hitch in a measly half-shrug—the way Kael's got him pinned won't allow for much else—and shakes his head. Miserably introspective, he considers himself a great many things, but unique has never been among them.

Odd, maybe.

"I don't know," Rommath says softly. He can only hold Kael's gaze for a moment before he finds himself staring at the sheets once more, but a moment is plenty for him to see the prince as he always has. "Perhaps…once or twice."

Kael grins brighter still, drawing him close so he can feel the prince's breath hot on his cheeks.

It's moments like these that grant him the briefest respite from his worries, these few scarce moments of peace and calm.

"Stay awake a little longer, would you?" asks the prince, those soft words he'd spoken so many times as a boy. "You've got to keep talking, so I know you're still here."

"Shall I tell you a story?"

Kael breathes a contented sigh, resting his forehead against Rommath's. "Please, yes. Tell me of home, of Silvermoon."

"Ah, an excellent choice, Your Grace," he says, nodding his approval. "I'll tell you of the hero-prince who brought us back."

" _No._ " Kael tenses, and Rommath's world tenses with him. "I don't think—I can't—"

"None of that nonsense," he tells him, shaking his head like his voice shakes and the ground shakes beneath them, the cosmos quaking, breaking apart. "If I had to put my faith in anything, it'd be you."

Kael doesn't look convinced, just queasy.

"Fine, all right," he says. "I'll save all the tales of splendor for your return. Bet there'll be plenty of parties and parades."

The prince smiles like a flash of lightning—fleeting, but it makes an imprint in Rommath's vision, unmistakable. And when the earth beneath them crumbles, Outland ripping itself to pieces, he tells himself it's just a thunderclap—any respectable lightning bolt demands applause, right?

Right.

"I have a proposition," Rommath says—soft, the way his voice should be. "What if I tell you a story of a boy and his prince, and the tutor who locked them out of the house for twenty-two hours straight so she could get laid?"

* * *

He should be fast asleep by this hour, but he rarely sleeps through nights like these.

Too bright.

On holiday eves, the braziers stay lit until dawn.

The elders had called it tradition, when there were still elders to prickle about customs and rituals, but most all the elves knew then as they know now—the fires had been meant for the drunkards, a light to guide them back to their homes.

After Silvermoon's fall, they'd become something else entirely.

Now, they honor the embers. Just like they'd been told.

"We are broken, burned to ash," their prince had said, "but let them watch and see—we will rise again, reforged stronger than before."

Kael and his silver tongue.

The crowds hadn't even heard how his voice wavered. They'd stitched their new emblem on every banner and tabard and flag, emblazoned their new names on every house crest, and risen they certainly had. Of course—they had to rise if ever they were to fall again.

And tonight, the city of Silvermoon remembers.

They remember their houses and homes, their loved ones lost, their names and the pride they had felt once—when their families were vast and storied—when their families were more than just themselves.

Rommath remembers when the Day of the Dead was nothing, a meaningless holiday, when all the memories he'd had to honor weren't memories, but people, alive and well.

He remembers his father, a stiff noble with a starched scowl, but an unrivaled skill for spinning stories. He remembers an uncle, cantankerous and loud, with skin as brittle as wet parchment left to dry in the sun. He remembers the father before that, who had a voice like a whisper and ghost-white hair that fell down past his knees.

He remembers a time when he didn't have to remember.

He's sure the others remember just as well, as they crowd the streets below, clinging to the braziers, watching the flames.

 _There's no power in ashes_ , he thinks, scowling. (Not scowling, really; it's just how he looks, now.)

What do they expect? All their memories to rise from ash like the phoenixes of legend?

No. Not everyone can be so unfortunate. It is no blessing to see the dead reborn. But the fall of Silvermoon is years past, and they seem to have forgotten, despite the shambling horrors that still prowl along the southern shores of the Elrendar.

Rommath, in all his infinite luck, has received a rather recent reminder. But Quel'Danas remains shrouded in stormclouds and shadows, tonight.

It is far nicer to be visited by memories. Mere memories cannot do harm. A little insomnia, perhaps—nothing more.

Rommath cherishes his memories.

He remembers Dalaran as it once was, a city of violet and gold, of streets filled with magic. He remembers Lordamere Lake and the trees, and counting down the days until the fall equinox to watch the leaves turn brittle, the colors of flame. He remembers Silvermoon as it had been, rich in both wealth and number, and Kael's grin when they'd return—the city was his, and he'd loved it fiercely.

This—Kael—he remembers most often, remembers him in everything.

In his books, in his solitude, in his twisted-tangled blankets when rest eludes him.

He's no stranger to sleepless nights, kept awake by his guilts and his griefs, these memories of his.

Every night is the Day of the Dead to Rommath.

He remembers a time when he was not the only one to wake in the midst of the night to darkness, panting and terrified, and he remembers a time when he owed all his sleepless nights to his company, not his lack thereof.


End file.
